


Winter's Bargain

by Nemonus



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-02-06 13:39:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12818721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Rescued by Aloy and now under the watchful eye of the Carja court's many spies, Sylens reluctantly helps put Meridian back together after the attack on the Spire. Someone seems to want to keep the Carja nervous, and Sylens needs to find out whether they're an enemy or an ally.





	1. Chapter 1

He must have been thrown onto the ice.

That would explain the hard surface underneath him, the concussed confusion as his eyesight blurred. People stood over him, songs distorted behind heavy wire-and-cloth headsets. Their voices cracked and reverberated. Sylens had done something terribly wrong. Of that he was certain. The werak had decreed this cold vengeance for what he had done. 

Aloy said, “If I had known _you_ were the person who needed rescuing, I wouldn’t have come.”

Sylens opened his eyes. 

Red desert dust caked his hands, the orange blankets in front of him, and Aloy’s jacket. Heat washed off her. It felt like the desert sun, but something metallic too, like the HADES unit. She looked more muscular than he remembered, heavier, as if she had been given gravitas by her conquests. 

The red-and-gold battlement walls around him looked Carja. Not ice at all; heat and heavy blankets covered him. There were more people in the room than he had seen in months, more than he cared to see. Three masked guards were arranged behind Aloy like nervous Watchers. They were extraneous, a sign of a nervous sovereign. Aloy could have attacked him while he was asleep if she had wanted. The guards did serve to partially hide a man dressed in the lighter finery of a Carja noble, who waited patiently beside the closed wooden door. 

Until now, Sylens had imagined that he could have walked through Meridian at almost any time unobserved; although his markings might be memorable, most people who knew his face were dead. In the course of their business he and Bahavas had met once at a shrine near the edge of the city and once in the holy circle near the apex. On other days, he had gone to the markets on the outskirts with his arms and head covered, to forestall questions from Carja who found Banuk memorable. 

He had certainly never been _here_ before. 

“Aloy? Where am I?”

Aloy ignored the guards as surely as Sylens had done. “You were hurt. Do you remember the Vantage near the prison?”

The prison? Ah, she meant the one in the Sundom. Sylens still had a feeling that exile should be cold. Maybe that was why the avalanche-prone cliffs of the Alpha site had sometimes been a comfort. Now, though, the palette of his life was not blue and white but shades of green. 

He had had months wandering in deserts to disprove his fear of the cold, not to mention the time spent here, in the humid forest. The idea had never departed, though. When he had been a child he had seen an exile taken onto the ice, the shamans singing in praise to the justice of the rime. The man had been half-mad with poison, but he had been alive enough to weakly struggle.

That wasn’t what Aloy was talking about, though. “Yes, of course I remember. The Vantages are made to be difficult to access, and this one was no different.” The cache up in the mountains would have been a good place for a relay signal. Not an essential part of the plan, but something in him had wanted to take a journey that long. He needed to stretch his legs, to ride without needing to go anywhere. Maybe, he needed to look at the mesa and wonder whether Aloy was in Meridian. 

“Someone yelled. It turned out to be you. Avad’s people wrapped your arm, but it will take a long time for the bruises to heal.”

“You brought me to _Meridian_?” He lowered his voice, both for their secrets and because he was angry. Afraid, too; he doubted that Carja justice was any kinder than Ban-Ur’s.  

Aloy nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. She knew it was a weighted decision.

“Foolish. I suppose I should thank you for saving my life, but I didn’t think you had any particular love for this city.” Sylens sighed. She might have saved his life. It had been a careless fall, and now that the tattered dreams were clearing, his left arm ached fiercely. 

Instead of asking anything further, Aloy turned away fast, the beads in her hair jangling against the metal sewn into her clothing. “Let me talk to him alone,” she said, talking through the guards to the nobleman still half out of sight behind them. 

“A minute, no longer.” The man had a clipped voice full of confidence. It sounded familiar, but Sylens had intentionally stayed out of bloody Carja court politics when he was luring Bahavas and the other members of the gang that would become the Eclipse. The king had only mattered as much as Helis’ revenge demanded he did. 

Aloy nodded. Sylens sat up as the guards walked out, leaving him with a better view of the single door in the little tower room and the bench on which they had placed him. Aloy folded her arms, looked like she considered sitting down and then decided against it. 

“There were bandits near the Vantage,” Sylens said. “Some of them caught me on the cliff and must have fled when you came. I did not just fall off the ledge.” 

Aloy smirked, did not directly reply. “I haven’t told Avad and Marad who you are,” she said.

“And why not?”

“You gave me the tools I needed to defeat HADES. And our last conversation was … unusually civil. Now we’re even.” 

Sylens chuckled. She didn’t know that the spear had included the key that was meant to send a version of HADES, caged again, back to his new hideout. There was something appealingly reasonable about the exchange of debt, though. Hadn’t they all been paying the debts of the Old Ones, all this time? Hadn’t humanity deserved what it got, for Faro’s sin of erasing APOLLO? Sylens wasn’t sure. Aloy, though, was the only other person likely to understand any of that at all.

“In fact, that’s why I was in the forest in the first place, setting up new relays. If we could use Eclipse equipment to speak to a controlled version of HADES, to cage it, we could learn so much more,” he said. 

Aloy was taken aback. “You’re just … telling me that? You trust me with that? Did it not occur to you what HADES did last time? Did you want to do that again?”

“I was in the desert. I thought that if the Faro robots rose up out of the ground it would be a terrible loss but at least I wouldn’t be around to see civilizations destroyed again.” He shifted, found that his arm ached only slightly less if he tucked it against his side. “We make scant few pieces of information now. For them to be consumed again …”

“But now you’re telling me you want to do that exact same thing again.”

“No. Not to unleash it. To control it. To talk to it, as you talked to GAIA. With the spear, with the Alpha Override, I think we could do it.”

“I was here.”

“What?”

“I was here, in Meridian, when the world almost ended. You know that. I would have had to watch innocent _people_ die, not just myself. I will not face that again if I can prevent it with my own hands.”

“Exactly! Exactly.” Sylens sat up, swinging his feet to the floor. It didn’t hurt to move that far. How had she carried him here? Drugged with hintergold, on the back of a Strider? “Aloy, if we learn what HADES has to tell us we can find out more about the kind of technology that created GAIA in the first place.”

“I can still work with GAIA, in the Nora lands.” She uncrossed her arms, sat heavily down on the side of the couch where his legs had been. 

“Then you understand the knowledge they both could give us.”

“I heard the recordings. Quantum processing, was that the one? That’s what you would have destroyed us all for.” 

“That is what I trust you with now. We could remake the Earth, Aloy.”

“I won’t allow it. The Kestrels won’t allow it.”

“I know. So I’ll help you. Whatever you’re working on here … I don’t doubt my knowledge of the city will help you.” 

“Locked together by a bargain again. I’m beginning not to regret rescuing you, if this sort of fight results. Too few people …” 

“Even though the world is at stake?”

“It won’t be. Because you won’t leave my sight.” She stood up. “This _is_ good timing. Marad has me working on some things in the city. We can both stay out of trouble.”

“Good. You deserve a place as Avad’s investigator. You deserve Marad’s place as advisor, really.” It was a guess, based on the name she had used, but it was also honest. Sylens did not doubt that Aloy was more intelligent than any of the Carja courtiers. 

Aloy pushed a sigh out in a loud burst. “I won’t tell them who you are. I’m saving that one for when I might need it.” 

“To use against me? A good decision for both of us, I think.” 

Aloy rapped on the inside of the door.

The guards hadn’t gone far. Almost immediately, the door opened and the man in the robes, the one Aloy had called Marad, walked in. Sylens carefully stood. 

Aloy looked between them. “Sylens, this is Blameless Marad. Sylens helped me … prepare for the attack on the city.”

“Greetings. You come highly recommended, and Aloy … I’m sure you know how much she did for the city.”

Was he probing, wanting to know where Sylens was during the attack? Aloy had seemed to think everything would go smoothly. “Blameless. That’s a … notable name.” 

“Is it? Some people certainly say so.”

“…Do they.” 

“Right now, my advice is that Aloy consider her work,” Marad said. “After the attack, some people are rebuilding and others are taking advantage of the chaos. The Hunter’s Lodge has been taking in scared farmers. There’s plenty to do, if you want to help us while your friend recovers.” 

Aloy did not hesitate. “Yes. I already know a few places where we could help out with supplies. The Nora have already left, but … like you said. Lots of refugees.” 

“You know where to find me,” Marad spoke with clipped authority, like a teacher telling a child how far they were allowed to stray. When he went out, leaving the door open behind him, he conspicuously gestured for the guards to move out onto the next lower balcony, far enough that they could see the doorway but not so far that they were obviously watching the tower. Sylens watched him go. He had a feeling that Marad was more than an advisor; someone so effortlessly practiced at giving out no information at all was more likely a spymaster. Sylens could admit when he was outclassed — to himself, at least. Unfamiliar with the city as he was, Marad would be able to track him easily. 

Aloy nodded at the door. She always looked ahead, didn’t she? Always forward. 

“You’ll be able to stay here in the palace,” Aloy said, and led him out. “But I have work to do. Machines are all out of their usual territories after the attack.” 

Years ago, Sylens would have thought that he might never walk the streets of Meridian again. He had little use for the city itself as long as he could lure people like Bahavas out of it. The chaos in the court had worked to his advantage. Now, Sun priests did not walk in bloody-minded procession but hunched their shoulders on their way to shamed and profaned alters. Sylens almost laughed at how unlikely it was that someone would recognize him. As soon as they crossed the bridge from the palace, people crowded them. Farmers from lands shelled and shredded during the attack, hunters who had made their way to the Spire to seek their fortune, and thrill-seekers now seeking no more than hot food and passage north thronged the streets. 

People recognized Aloy, though. 

Vendors called out to her, not to sell but to thank. She greeted some people with clasped hands and a nod toward the Hunter’s Lodge. “Tell Talanah I say hello.” Soon enough, though, Aloy found her own apartment door and opened it onto a large, cool room. Sylens shut the door behind him. The trap door on the left side of the room had recently been broken, and sharp pieces still stuck out from the edges of the stone passageway. Otherwise, the room was decorated in Carja finery. 

“They gave me this place,” Aloy said bluntly, setting her bow and arrows down beside the door. She followed them with the spear Sylens had given her, and met his eyes. “The last owner is gone.” 

“How convenient for you.” 

“He was a complicated man.” She let the spear go, moved to sit on a cushioned bench beside it. “But now we have a chance to do more. Let me explain what we’re working on here.” 

“Wait.You kept my secret, for now. The thing that could put me in greater danger than any other person in this city. You trust yourself with it. Why?” Sylens did not hesitate to be blunt. 

She looked down. “Because we’re the only ones who know.” She stood, faced him furious. “If I told Avad that you had helped call HADES down on this city, they could kill you. I don’t know if Avad would, or if Marad would sway him. And then our last piece of information is gone, a lifetime worth of research. You’re wrong about so many things, Sylens, so very many. But you did the work. And I won’t see the only other person who understands that work destroyed.”

So fierce. So … he watched the line of her jaw as she tilted her face up toward him. The thin, white scar was barely visible from one side of her neck to the other, like a terrible smile. 

He nodded. “And what is our work?” 

“First, we’re going hunting.” 


	2. Chapter 2

The lance in Aloy’s hands glowed as she edged through the tall grass in Meridian’s parklands. Morning fog had given way to a humid afternoon, highlighting the green of the plants and the red plateau. 

“Over there,” Aloy murmured. 

Sylens had already seen the Fire Bellowback. It was difficult to miss on the other side of the narrow canal. The liquid cargo on its back swayed and splashed inside its transparent casing as the machine seemed to sniff along the river bank. Were its movements aimless, or did it follow some new track, one given to it in panicked reaction to the Spire’s signal? 

“Marad says he thinks someone drove them in,” Aloy whispered. "We’ll look around the gates later. For now, they’re certainly not in their usual territory, so … we drive them out.” 

“Do you trust Marad?” Sylens said.

“I thought you didn’t care for trust.”

Sylens almost laughed. “I speak of the currency _you_ spend, not my own.” 

Aloy’s affect was frigid. Maybe she had labored over the words he had said to her in the jungle, turning over and over that idea of _mutual self-interest._ It would explain the sudden chill she exuded. Cold was part of both of them, the cold caverns of what they had discovered beneath Sunfall and the storm after. All of GAIA’s creations had broken in that forest at once: a Strider dead, the winds ripping at the earth, Aloy and Sylens on a narrow patch of dry ground asking one another for permission to be warm. He had awoken beside her and driven himself out into the rain to look at the living Strider and wonder what machinery had gotten under his skin to make him feel so loyal to the very person most likely to understand his need to leave.

They had been bound to one another, surely as the chips of metal clipped to their ears were bound to the network, and the signal made their coldness to one another glint like frost on spring buds. 

“Marad has plans,” Aloy said. “I think most of them don’t have anything to do with us. He cares about Avad.” 

“Then they have little to do with us, indeed. Why stay in this city, Aloy?”

She shifted on her toes. Sylens crouched slightly behind her, bending low into the grass to keep out of sight of the machine. Aloy's hair and clothing were much more suitable to this type of hunting ground than his own. If he had been alone he would have set traps instead of walking close like this, entangled the machines in chains before he approached with his lance for the killing strike. Aloy seemed to prefer stealth and close-range fights in the long grass common in the east. 

Aloy shushed him. “Another Bellowback. See?”

An Ice Bellowback wandered through a field of cut grass on the other side of the canal. Sylens was about to whisper to her a plan to separate the two machines when Aloy darted forward. The sway of the grass resolved into her easy hunter’s jog, and she slipped away toward the bridge. Sylens edged toward the second Bellowback. Aloy was more well-equipped than he by far, and he paused to watch how she began her work. 

She slung the bow into her hands, loosed two arrows at once into the beast’s belly. As soon as they hit she moved again, loosing two more that sent delicate crystals of ice blooming xagainst the Bellowback’s bulbous top. Sylens turned and crossed the bridge. What he wouldn’t give for traps, or for a tearblaster or grappling cord, but most of his equipment had been taken by the Carja or left when Aloy found him at the bottom of the cliff. Of course he would be thrown into a fight without proper weapons. Of course the Carja would not know — 

He blinked his Focus on and saw the violet path of the Bellowback’s programmed steps. The path extended back into the woods, but part of it was broken and flashing. The creature’s programming had been disrupted, its GAIA-given instincts jogged out of place by the Faro robots rising out of the ground. He sat back on his haunches on the far side of the bridge and began to examine the Focus’ controls, wondering whether he could set the machine back on its course through the interface without having to touch it at all.

It seemed he hadn’t hidden well enough. The Bellowback’s head came up, metal cords creaking as they swung beneath its neck. The shadow of it swayed across the river like its own creature. Heavier than three Striders, the Bellowbacks reminded Sylens of armories. Hit them in the right place and it would all go up in ice, but the Bellowback’s weight alone would propel it toward its attacker with crushing force even in death.

It reared up at the sight of him. Sylens ducked to the other side of the trellis, then down into the canal. Water splashed cold on his hands but did not soak through the insulated soles of his boots in the time it took for him to lever himself up the other side. Closer to the Bellowback than he wanted to be, close enough to be within the sweep of the extruded steel tail, he stabbed the lance into the Bellowback’s near eye.

The machine raised its head and roared, spilling shards of ice. Sylens ducked under its neck, rested a hand for one precarious second on the metal plate below the other eye before angling the spear and wedging the point in. He pushed down and levered out the other eye. The Bellowback turned, furious, to try to crush him between its neck and shoulders.

Sylens ran. Ice showered around him and he dodged sharp shards pelting his head. The lance heavy in his hand tipped toward the ground, so he swung it up in an arc to maintain the momentum, tilting the point back at the belly of the swaying Bellowback. If he threw true and the cargo conduits exploded, he could retrieve the blackened spear afterward —

Machine noises behind him forced him to look around. Footsteps slammed onto the ground and leaves from the distant treeline flew through the air as two Ravagers emerged sniffing and furious from the shadows of the forest. 

_Shouldn’t throw the spear._

On the other side of the field, Aloy was still working her way around a Fire Bellowback struck by ten arrows and limping. Sylens saw her hair whip across her shoulders as she turned around to see the two Ravagers. 

She charged forward, tucked her lance under her arm, and pressed the sun-bright interface against the Bellowback’s flank. The override would take some heartbeats to complete, and meanwhile Sylens needed to work his way around the only barely wounded Ice Bellowback before the Ravagers did more than stare. Were there not Carja guards watching, no well-trained disciples of the Sun to provide aid? He shook his head at the idea of Kestrels clustered like eyases on the clifftops, observing.

He had not broken the Ravager’s lines of sight yet, so he headed around to try to cross the canal at the nearest bridge. 

Aloy’s voice in his ear was tense and authoritative. “Go north. The Fire machine should cover you.” 

He crossed the bridge as quietly as he could on the creaking planks. In the field, machines clashed with the creak and scream of stressed metal. He found himself in a maze of fields near the plateau’s southeastern wall, the lance gripped tight in his hands and a Ravager stomping on the other side of a row of beanstalks. 

“West,” Aloy muttered. “I’ve got this one.” 

He thought he heard the shushing pull and release of the arrows in the Focus-sound. He moved further west among the stalks.  Some of the maize grew taller than he was, sharp-edged and whispering. Aloy’s breathing occasionally murmured through the Focus. How many times had she and Sylens done this, guided one another connected just by voice? Sunfall. Everything came back to Sunfall, and that shift after he hadn’t been able to hear her any more. They had started to count on one another’s voices, hadn’t they? 

“Don’t take too long,” he snapped. The Ravager stepped over the canal, its legs as long as the lowest struts of the Oseram elevator. 

“So impatient.” She laughed low, and he almost stumbled. 

His stomach turned. “ _Aloy.”_ She might have broken the Focus connection. _Hurry up, Aloy. Say my name, give me proof of this thing that changed the night after Sunfall._ He was going to go mad or be eaten by a Ravager. He turned to point the lance at the approaching machine. _Say my_ name — 

Aloy whispered, “West.” 

The Ravager hit the wet ground on the near side of the canal. Dirt sprayed into the air and pattered down again. Sylens planted his feet for the throw, then saw the mountainous tanks of the Fire Bellowback behind it. 

The Ravager turned. Claws dug into the dirt as the Bellowback tackled the Ravager, swinging its long nose into the other machine’s chest. The Ravager held its ground, clawed with one foot in frantic scrapes against the Bellowback’s belly. Sylens took three steps forward and drove his spear into the Ravager’s chest, trying to tear down one of the vital fluid lines on the way to the load-bearing joints of the one front leg pinned by the Bellowback. The other leg kept kicking, shaking the machine dangerously toward him, but he could see pieces he recognized in the Ravager as similar to those in the Sawtooth. If he had been stripping this machine for parts on an ice field instead of here in the sun he would have pushed his weight down _here_ —

His angle was bad because he was stabbing upward instead of down into a corpse, but the Ravager’s leg sparked and loosened on its hinge. The machine yowled, a high-pitched growl breaking into static. Sylens wrenched the spear free and took long steps back, unsure of whether the Bellowback would push the Ravager down onto where he stood or onto the nearby trellis — 

Pulling the spear out at an angle destabilized the leg further, so that it fell under the Bellowback’s weight. Sylens turned away and covered his eyes, scowling as dirt and maize fell. The overridden Bellowback paused, and when the sounds of creaking and screaming steam quieted down he turned back to see the blue-wreathed machine slowly backing off the wreckage. Aloy climbed up after it, the lance slung on her back, and patted the plates on the Ravager’s back carefully before pulling herself up to crouch between the pieces. 

“Sylens?”

There. The shush of the syllables echoed, trailed off while he steeled his expression.

“You must have seen how the trails are broken,” he said. She was more than observant enough for that. “These machines were disturbed from their paths and unable to return.” 

Aloy’s hands flicked to her Focus. Had she been waiting to hear anything in particular from him? How strange, for her to be watching the battlefield from a clearer vantage while he fought in the middle with the machines. He had moved quickly where she told him to go, as she had done when he had lead her to Sunfall and the Alpha site and the Eclipse’s Tallneck. Such a quiet exchange, such silences — 

“The Kestrels are going after the other Ravager,” Aloy said, and flung herself away, down the other side of the mountainous machine. 

So, the Sundom had finally decided to help. Sylens crossed the bridge again, shaking his head at Aloy’s unstoppable level of energy. The Ice Bellowback lay in pieces on the field, blackened and trailing black smoke from its partner’s fire. Kestrels formed a half-moon around the snapping, pouncing Ravager. Aloy’s Ravager stalked forward, taking the canal in one leap. Sylens, wary, watched a tall woman, black-armored, wave the Meridian archers back toward the paths up the plateau. 

 _Vanasha, the spy who helped Aloy recover the queen at Sunfall. An unnecessary errand, but impossible to ignore now that it has been done. Nasadi and Itamen will influence Avad, who will influence Marad, who I must try to keep from influencing_ me _…_

The Kestrels moved in practiced arrow formations back up the hill while the blue-maned Ravager broadsided the other with laserfire. Strikes stitched down its sides, lit its power cell up with sparks until the canister popped and took part of the Ravager’s shoulder with it. By the time the machined turned, the cannon and the arrows had combined to do their work. Aloy’s Ravager approached, shooting, and the other crouched and tried to come down on its foe with a desperate swipe of blackened claws before falling to pieces as it lunged. The thunderous sounds of the fight died into the tick of the living Ravager’s joints and the quiet beep of Aloy’s armor as the shield reset. 

She had followed the overridden Ravager, and now patted it on the ankle before sketching something in the air with her Focus. Sylens couldn’t see the command she gave from his own Focus images, but it seemed to have repaired the Ravager’s own path. The machine padded off into the forest, headed out past the Spire and away from fields planted by Meridian’s farmers. 

Aloy looked up at him. The Focus on her ear glinted slick like the metal of that terrible doorway, like the cords in the throat of a Cauldron. He could imagine her crawling from the Earth like a machine, oil in her blood as blue as the veins on the insides of her wrists — daughter of the Earth, meant to read invisible signs. She had been born to the challenges he had clawed his way into, programmed as surely as the machines — but no. He could consider his own frustration without also being galled by her victories. She insisted on her own humanity (even though to be born of a machine was a blessing, the Banuk shamans once said, and if the false spirits of the blue light lived in anyone it was in this reincarnation of Elizabet Sobek’s most ambitious future — 

The other Banuk instinct he could not remove: do not shame another by offering excessive help.)

Vanasha said, “Look at this.” 

Aloy and Sylens moved to her. On the muddy ground between the high plateau path and the opening of the planted fields there were tracks on the path to the east, separated from where the Kestrels had marched. The machines had been diverted from their paths, but they were not the only factor: someone had left not only deeply cut boot marks but the circle-and-dash mark of the Eclipse cut into the gate.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is becoming a jigsaw puzzle of a project, so the posted chapter numbers may change, but not likely by much. This also seems like a decent time to say thank you to the people who have commented so far. Especially in a small ship in a small fandom like this, comments can make a big difference.

Marad had suspected. The Eclipse had been scattered, its leadership slain in front of Avad’s eyes. Those people still held their grudges, though, as Dervahl had done. Some, with efforts at restitution, could be bought back into the Carja proper as quiet citizens who could live their lives, tilling their ground and nurturing their children or their village’s children. Recovery was a steep hill, but one that could be climbed.

Others would not turn aside from the mission they had been told was holy. Marad sighed, lifted his hand against his forehead to shield his eyes and steel his nerves as he stood at one of the golden railings near Avad’s canopied throne. He had foiled eight assassination attempts in the parlor stage in the last year, eight people or groups of people who had wanted to see Avad’s young blood on the golden floor. Marad’s agents had ensured those plans never got past the parlor, never got past drunken boasts. When people were guided home and the bottle eased from their hands, a knife held to their throat or an embarrassing secret whispered in their ear, that attempted revolutionary would go to sleep into nightmare and wake up sick and ashamed of jumping at shadows. Most political furies could be eased this way, with the right pressure point of embarrassment and threat.

Avad did not carry out the threats, of course. Avad’s anger was patrilineal and sated. That was a valued trait in a ruler, true sanguinity and true kindness. Marad was fond of Avad for it.

This was why Avad gave the spy work to Marad and his agents. This was one of the reasons Avad chose not to hear every record of Marad’s work.

Another reason: it helped the king sleep.

Aloy’s return had spooked the dissidents. While not many were left after the attack on the Spire had torn up everyone’s carefully planted plans, Marad had been beginning to see new signs of anger. He was not yet certain whether they had come from a central source, an idea person, or whether they were working on their own. They could even be newly adult hunters, flush with too much energy and not enough work in the fertile maizelands. Whoever they were, Aloy would find them. The Sun shone gently onto him as Marad thought it, and his own mild religious devotion stirred vaguely godward and rolled back to sleep.

He just had to be sure that she did not become the claw of the Carja such that when she left — and she would — people perceived Avad as defenseless again. Her companion seemed savvy but harmless; Aloy had had to rescue him from falling off a cliff, Marad recalled. He shook his head and turned to go back into the halls at the center of the plateau, there to walk down to the library near the cliff’s edge. Aloy and Vanasha would reach the top of the hill soon.

* * *

 

The library in the palace at Meridian had not been sacked during the coup. This had been a matter of apathy, not choice: the Sun-Priests had burned and exalted other books in their day. Many were the scrolls that had burned in the city’s public braziers for the crime of mentioning the prowess of kings before Jiran. The king’s private library, inherited and redecorated by Avad and his advisors, had remained a sanctuary for older texts in which records of Meridian’s founding had been given the newly fashionable, more amicable political slant. Meridian’s expansionary wars were reframed as noble explorations under both regimes.

Sylens enjoyed the quietude of the place. Tightly rolled scrolls wrapped in neat ribbons sat in cubby holes made of wood stained red and bronze. Books were open to delicate drawings and detailed maps. Even the pieces in places of honor were not chained down. The library occupied a cool stone vault inside the plateau palace, and it would take just a day more of casing to figure out how to walk out with the best of its works.

Aloy moved ahead of him, following Vanasha, both of them loping along the neatly organized walls as comfortably as Aloy had moved in the maizelands. She touched her fingers to her Focus, holding the scan for just a heartbeat before marking off any reactive data for later. Vanasha did not seem to notice. They quickly outpaced Sylens and the Kestrels.

Avad, Marad, and Nasadi met Aloy at the other end of the room. Sylens had not seen Nasadi since Sunfall; the queen looked as if she had aged backwards, becoming more radiant and straight-backed after her captivity. She spread out a map across a table and began to weigh its edges with stones.

“This isn’t the first attack.” Avad, barely more than a boy-king, looked nervous. In the oppressive heat he acted as if he was cold, arms crossed and jaw tight. His gaze skimmed over Sylens, more concerned with Aloy and Vanasha. Good. Would it not be a nightmare to be recognized here? Sylens had travelled to the furthest outskirts of Carja territory and now stood here, back inside by some law of physics that demanded objects in circular flights stay in circles. If that track was interrupted, the forces released would be terrible.

If Bahavas or Helis were still alive and spotted him here, he could be executed on the spot … but he and Aloy had made sure that they were not.

Sylens kept half of his attention on Avad as the king explained that Eclipse marks had recently been found on gates, on masons’ stones, on wells poisoned by corpses of dead rabbits. Marad cautioned that it could be copycat work, an unsubtle attempt at mockery now that the wars were officially over, the Eclipse mostly scattered, and the rumors of the attack on the Spire running wild. Or perhaps it really was remnants of the Eclipse, shorn of their leaders, trying to rally around delinquency instead of or in advance of genocide.

Aloy, concerning herself more with logistics than motive, began to trace lines where machines had come from. Nasadi conferred with her about where traders or refugees entered the city, and Marad offered quick summaries of where people had been displaced after the fighting. Marad had been in Jiran’s court while Sylens was recruiting Bahavas, but he had not been a spymaster then. Bahavas had remembered him as a clever page, one whom Behaves had eyed as a potential for priesthood. Marad’s own inclinations had never lead him that way, though, and Bahavas had moved on to recruiting toughs and dead machines.

Aloy and Vanasha muttered at the war table in the corner. “A new break in the tree line here —“

“—not likely to come from the city if —“

“—searching around the waterfalls —“

Sylens examined the scrolls nearest to him. What could Meridian possibly have from before the attack that HADES itself did not? Had anyone measured how machines behaved around it? If the method of transmission could be understood in more detail … He had been inducted into some of the mysteries of spectrum, but some studies needed to be put aside because they did not involve the specific frequency through which the Focuses spoke to one another or, Sylens remembered with a chill, HADES spoke to its FARO Scarabs.

There was something in the cubby among the scrolls, a black machine claw like the tread of a Corruptor. Sylens glanced at the guards. He might pick it up just to see what they would do. How much did they know about what secrets this library might hold?

The claw was half way inside one of the shelves. Sylens reached in and slid it out without wrinkling the paper to either side.

Yes, this was something important. The guards reacted quickly, a coordinated flinch across three men. The man nearest him reached out a hand but did not quite touch him. “Excuse me. Do not move the artifacts.”

Sylens turned the claw over. “This?”

“Do not …”

“I find both your hierarchy and security to be disappointing, if removing two Bellowbacks is not enough to allow one the privilege of touching an artifact set out in the open.”

“It was inside the shelf,” one of the guards attempted.

It was this that seemed to finally draw Marad’s attention. He glided over from the king’s side. “What’s this?”

“Captain said we aren’t supposed to let anyone touch anything in the library.”

“Remind me of your name,” Marad said softly.

Sylens opened his hand. “I am an interested wanderer.” The Corruptor claw thumped onto the table. With no power source at all and not even a way to connect to one with the ends sheared clearly apart, it was as heavy and lifeless as a rock. “Aloy and I worked together, before the attack on the Spire. You have us to thank for some of your walls holding.”

Marad’s expression smoothed out, replacing an increasingly sour look with an envoy’s blank one. He looked over at the table. “Is that right, Aloy?”

She had been bent over the map, pointing at a location nearer to Nasadi. While Avad hovered like a frightened bird, Vanasha had almost blended into the background. Uncannily for someone so striking, she could lean against a table and project an aura of astonishingly convincing boredom. Just a citizen visiting the library. No information here at all.

Aloy’s gaze was even more unsettling as she turned to Marad. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Your friend says that we owe him for our city still standing. Is that right?” _I just saw him palming the artifacts_ , Marad did not say. The Carja could be so courteous about their cruelty.

Not the reaction Sylens had wanted, but neither a problem he could not solve. Aloy, though. She caught his gaze and stared, clearly feeling as blind under the Sun as he had been when he thought about his orbit around the library too long. She would hold information over his head, but which part exactly? That he had founded the Eclipse? That he had worked with HADES? That he had taught Bahavas and cultivated Helis through inaction? Helis could have been talked down from his mad devotion. Sylens had not done that.

Aloy narrowed her eyes. “Why?” Her suspicion was cold and fiery at once. “Sylens. What did you do?”

Marad raised an eyebrow.

Ah, so now Aloy was suspicious. That was a problem — and he felt guiltier about it than about dislodging the work of an anonymous librarian. She had rescued him. She had tied both of them together in their deals and plans, risked death for one another. The world owed them both, and the pressure of it made them into diamonds.

He gestured at the claw. “I examined that.”

Aloy’s cheeks flushed. She knew something. Maybe she was thinking of Ban-Ur, of the theft that had unlocked the very first door to the Metal World that Sylens had ever known. “Your examining is going to get us into trouble.”

“And why is that?” Marad said.

“He’s a tinker,” Aloy said. “He used to work with the Eclipse, too. But we have a deal, Marad. You won’t break it.”

Sylens felt cold. Aloy’s regard was like water seen through ice: distorted, shifting. He had the sudden and terrible sense that she might reveal him. What would that give her? She would lose a partner in the research. He was certain that she would not risk their alliance. Or was he? He knew himself to be a liar and so struggled to think of a reason for Aloy not to lie.

Marad shrugged wry assent. “I trust you, Aloy.” The royalty by the table had raised their heads to look over now. Conscious of his audience, Marad raised his voice. “Aloy’s deeds allow her leeway. Her deeds and the rumors. They say you can become invisible, that you kill people who displease you, that you call machines. Some rumors are kind, others are fearful. Both serve different ends, depending if one wants to demonize the Nora or the Carja or another group entirely. You understand the value of a good rumor, I think.”

Aloy said, “Give us — he and I and whoever you can find for us — the chance to catch these Eclipse soldiers, or pranksters, or whoever they are. If we find out who did it and there’s proof that it wasn’t Sylens, we’ll go on our way. Ways. If we find out it was him, I won’t stop you from whatever you want to do.”

_Good, Aloy. Appeal to their desire for control._

The Kestrel behind Sylens had begun to bristle, his expression souring and his grip on his long, thin spear tightening so hard that his knobby knuckles turned bone-white. The man with the Oseram-style mustache straightened his shoulders.

“Keep him inside the city, not outside the library.” Marad crisply chastised the guards. When he met Sylens’ eyes he managed to look calm. “You must understand that your prior association may be useful in this endeavor. We ask —”

“You insist,” Sylens said.

“We do.”

Was that a civic plural, the whole city arrayed behind Marad’s reptilian-cold eyes? Bahavas had been contrary too, sometimes. Helis had been easy to lead, as simple to goad as a Strider on a rope. What hooks could he put in Marad? Sylens made an obvious effort to turn away from the claw.

Marad pressed his fingers on either side of his nose. “There is also the chance that someone may have let those machines in, or driven them in out of the forest.”

“They could have had Focuses, to see the tracks,” Aloy said.

Marad made a sound of recognition. Aloy turned to him. “Do you know something about that?” She asked.

“I had thought they were referring to you,” Marad said. “But there are rumors of people with strange devices that glow like your Focus.”

“If so, that would remove the possibility that they are with the Eclipse,” Sylens said.

“Because we took down the network.” Aloy nodded at him. “So we have a way to eliminate some suspects. If they have a Focus, they weren’t part of the original Eclipse.”

“Yes.”

“Yariki, the envoy from the Banuk, is in the city and might have seen something.”

“Good,” Marad said. “Talk to her when you can.” He looked at Sylens.

Sylens spoke before Marad could. “Am I a captive then?” He glanced at the guards. Aloy rolled her eyes behind Marad.

“Stay in the city and the fields until we sort this all out. Not past the Spire.” Marad looked at the guards to be sure they understood. “And Aloy, talk to Yariki if you think she knows something.”

Some of that work would be easier than others, Sylens thought. With Aloy keeping his identity secret — if only to hold the information over his head — he didn’t think Marad would bother him. Something had stuck in his mind about Marad, though, some data point that Sylens thought he had seen somewhere else. Had he ever met the man before?

It would have to be one of the many answers he found here.

* * *

 

After they were done mapping out potential routes for the machines, Aloy left the library quickly. The room had started to feel stuffy. Carja architecture was beautiful, but so heavy. Something had also begun to nag at her about Sylens’ presence. She wasn’t used to being in the same place as him for so long, for so many of her actions to have consequences around him in particular. After Sunfall she had begun to lean against the idea of him, to take comfort in his grudging aid. She had started to wonder again what it would be like to touch the cords on his arms, or to kiss him against the shelves in that library.

Having the reality so close was odd.

He seemed to think so too. He followed her at a distance, looking out over the steep drop toward the pools below.

It didn’t quite feel right insisting that Sylens be a captive in the city, but nor did it feel right knowing that he could still be working on something for HADES. He could cause plenty of trouble in the village if he intended to. Their bargain was set: Sylens would pause in his dangerous experimentation as long as Aloy kept the Carja from skinning him alive. Had she said the right thing to Marad today? She supposed she would have said the same thing about Nil. He is dangerous, but only when it serves him, and usually then it also served Aloy.

She started to speak without preamble. They were far enough away from one another that the Focus picked her voice up, transmitting to the channel he had forced open. Once she realized it, she lowered her voice so that the passersby could not hear. “Look, when you said that Marad was keeping you captive I wasn’t angry at you. I was disappointed. You can be subtler than that.”

Sylens ranged further around the other side of the balcony. It was so much easier to talk this way, Aloy thought. Without looking at his eyes but knowing he was there.

“Now I know that. I will be. Don’t start ordering me around, too," Sylens said. 

This was more familiar ground: Sylens being short with her and Aloy not caring.

“Remember, Marad said that I kill people who displease me," she said.

He paused. The slight crackle around the words, stronger in the stone palace, was as soft as an indrawn breath. “Do I displease you, Aloy?” he said, wry.

She felt her cheeks heat up. Well, _that_ would haunt her.

“No, Sylens.” The balcony curved; it brought them together at the bridge, to stand in front of stony-faced guards. Aloy met his eyes, willing him to understand. She would say this like she had him at spearpoint, and she would say it as if they were sitting side-by-side in safety by a fire. “You and I have a bargain.”

She broke the stare and moved across the bridge at a jog, relishing the slam of her own feet on the solid wood.

Last night she had dreamed about walking through the maizelands with Vanasha. They needed to reach a particular canyon in the mesa walls, but neither of them could find the right paths despite their familiarity. Maps became blurry, memory more so. Vanasha said that they needed to find the most quiet pathways, and so they moved from trail head to trail head listening. Aloy woke up before they found the canyon and lay under her blankets thinking about how they had gone from place to place looking for silence, silence, silence.

The slam of her own feet did not distract her too much from the voices around her. Over the sound of Sylens’ own footsteps and the shuffling of the guards, she heard Vanasha call her name insistently, as she had done when they first met.

“Aloy,” said the spy. “Wait.”


	4. Chapter 4

“I think I can help you find Yariki.” 

Aloy stopped her determined march across the bridge. Vanasha had appeared behind Aloy and Sylens without her footsteps sounding on the wood, appropriately quiet for Marad’s protégé. After catching Aloy’s attention and smiling slightly, Vanasha looked at Sylens with the expression Aloy felt she herself might have worn at Daytower. It was a surveying expression, a look for finding a border. Vanasha wore a mix of machine armor and flowing silks, more plate than cloth. A salmon-colored hood gracefully framed her face. 

“It’s good to see you back in the city,” Aloy told her.

“This is where I belong. Not everyone meets me on the edge of a desert filled with my enemies.” Vanasha gave another flashing smile. 

“What’s Yariki doing now that the tension between the Banuk and the Carja are settling down?” Aloy asked. 

“Working with Avad’s envoy, I think. Genial people.”

“Would you tell me if they weren’t?”

“Maybe, little huntress.”

Aloy glanced at the Spire in the distance, the thick canopy of trees below hiding the violence of the machines’ disrupted paths. “I’m going to look in the forest first; I don’t want to leave a hunt undone. Those Bellowbacks were following a path, I know they were. It just wasn’t the one…” Should she say _GAIA intended?_ “… they are supposed to.”

Vanasha caught on to her hesitation. “You see their paths clearly.” 

“Yeah,” Aloy said nervously. “There’s a … mechanism that should tell them what to do. It isn’t doing it. So …” She shifted, feeling the weight of the quiver at her side, the spear and bow across her back. “We’ll try to fix it.”

“When you need to find Yariki, let me know.” Vanasha did not seem shaken by Aloy’s attempt to talk around GAIA. Aloy glanced back as she continued across the bridge. 

Vanasha stood with her arms crossed, watching her go. Aloy thought she saw her mouth some words. Maybe “Be careful.” 

When Aloy turned back it was to a newly companionable feeling around Sylens, a unity borne from not having to explain the machines that pushed and pulled at her life. They walked in stride to the markets and back out into the sun on the terraces above the elevators. Some farmers who had finished selling their crop for the day were returning home with empty crates and full pockets. People here spoke freely among themselves or to Aloy and Sylens or to no one in particular, almost as if in memory of the enforced strictures of Jiran’s reign. Their voices faded away as she approached the elevator, the stoic guards in their Kestrel black-and-red. 

“Marad’s network will be useful to us,” Sylens murmured as Aloy hauled down on the lever to call the elevator platform. 

“What were you two talking about?” 

“The claw of a machine. From Jiran’s reign, it looked like, although someone might even have dug it out of the Earth and not known it for what it was. A mechanical oddity, hidden there in the library like a fossil while the Corrupters waited underneath the city.”

“But you recognized it.” The elevator arrived with a clatter and Aloy stepped in. It struck her as remarkable how quickly she had gotten used to the vertiginous height, the latticework of wooden beams, the sound of the chains. It had taken just a few trips up and down the mesa for the mechanical marvel to become yet anther obstacle in her way, when without it the ascent would have been impossible.

“It may even have been before my time with the Eclipse,” Sylens said. “We were more … protective.” 

Aloy looked up at him from the other side of the shaking, humming platform as it descended. “Right. Because you had such an organized, well-marked archive for your cult.” 

“Yes.” 

She watched the corners of his mouth to see whether he found the statement funny, and was left uncertain. When they left the elevator she was unusually conscious of how close they stood to one another, of their united front against the wide mouth of the platform. In peacetime, would he have been content to organize a library, reading and dissecting machines? For a moment he looked back at her with a depth of feeling that matched her own questioning thoughts. What other possible futures, possible pasts befell them? The world had gained some sort of elasticity during the descent. 

“That skill could come in handy if you used it for things that weren’t _terrible_ ,” she said, speaking under her breath just as the guards at either side of the gate slid bored glances to the passengers. 

“I thought that’s what we were doing now,” he said gently.

Aloy felt the pout on her own face and consciously smoothed her expression out, thinking of Vanasha’s poise. 

She wondered whether the guards would attempt to stop Sylens from leaving the city, but Marad _had_ said that the border was the Spire, and word might not have traveled to the bottom of the elevator more quickly than Aloy could walk. They passed through the market without incident, then through the places where people had begun to heal the scars from the HADES attack. Fertile black dirt had been churned up into trenches and craters. The sides of the river looked unnatural in ways Aloy couldn’t quite place, dirt mixed in different colors like stains in fan-shaped deltas misplaced along the waterway. 

She lead the way to the churned-up path to the Spire. New bridges had been hurriedly lashed to stones to make up for the parts which had collapsed during the attack. Last time she had been here she had been eager to see Sona and Varl, then discomforted by their fresh view of the Carja. While Sona refused to meet with Avad out of a sense of shy formality and a desire to mark that any alliance with the Carja only went so far, Aloy had felt like a stranger to the people she had once considered her closest allies. 

Now, instead, she watched Sylens climb in front of her. Some of the bridges were narrow enough for just one person, and hanging back meant that Aloy could watch Sylens do what he had surely done at the Alpha group’s mountain fortress. He climbed with surety and a graceful sense of his own weight and that of the pack on his back, gripping yellow rope handholds where he needed them with such care that he might have been adhered to them. Once he scooped up clay from the mountain and rubbed the tan scree between his hands, getting a textured grip for the more difficult parts of the ascent. 

Aloy found this climb much easier than it had been the first time, when she had rushed to see what terror HADES had dropped onto the fragile Nora, Oseram, and Carja fighters. The Sun was strong enough that she could feel sweat under her arms, but not so draining that she didn’t enjoy the last few obstacles of the climb. 

When she crested the last hillock just behind Sylens, he turned and offered her his hand. His eyes widened as if he had not expected to do it. It was with an equal sense of inevitability that Aloy took his hand, a tug at her mind that matched the pleasant strain in her legs and the momentum as he pulled her up. She instructed herself as if from a book: _meet his eyes. Feel the grit between his hands and yours, the chapped skin between his thumb and first finger. Part your own lips just to feel the Sun on your own skin, watch his gaze drop to your mouth. Be certain. Categorize this feeling like a scroll on the shelf, like a tag in the vision gifted by your Focus, like the feeling of the tiny weight on your ear._

She released his hand and jogged onto the flat ground. There were two Kestrels patrolling in the distance, upright and bristly like cacti. He walked beside her to the far edge of the grounds, near the edge of the Spire. The wreckage of a Deathbringer, stripped of many parts including its guns, lay where Aloy had killed it. Aloy skirted the middle of the area, reminded uncomfortably of the Sun-Ring. Except that now Sylens was pacing her, right _here_ instead of distant in her Focus and growing ever closer. 

Instead of going directly toward the base of the Spire, she moved to the edge of the cliff. She had never stood here quietly before, but the view was familiar from the stone tower where she had fought so many glinthawks. Now she could see that tower from the opposite vantage point, narrower and less groomed than the tower that held the Spire. 

Something thrashed in the trees below, dark leaves violently shaken. Aloy touched her Focus to key the overlay. A wide machine tottered into one of the open pathways, recognizable from the distance because of the distinct casing of a Bellowback. Shouldn’t that be Snapmaw territory? She scanned for the pond and found it. Tracking the Bellowbacks revealed more broken and truncated paths for the machines, arrows pointing at nothing. It was too far for her to see the tracks of the Snapmaws in the network, but a moment later the splayed solar panels of a Snapmaw reflected the Sun in the wake of the Bellowback. More thrashing below the trees: perhaps the machines fought.

Another Focus signal appeared out of the corner of her vision, as insistent as the signals from a Tallneck or the nonsense digital noise of a Banuk wind chime. 

“Aloy!” Sylens called from over a hillock. 

Certain that he had seen the same signal, Aloy turned and moved toward him. Although she couldn’t see him at first, she suspected that he would be at the base of the Spire and found her suspicion to be correct. The spear she had jammed into the HADES node was still there, but the node bled corruption. Strings of black and red stretched out like the legs of the half-drowned trees in the east. Corruption pooled below the Spire.

Sylens leaned on his own spear. Perhaps he had jabbed the corruption with it. “I insist on informing you that I considered _not_ telling you about this.” He faced the spear and looked up at her over the top of it, a shy thief intentionally caught.

Aloy rushed to the edge of the puddle breathing hard, scowled down at it as if it were an enemy on its own. “This shouldn’t be happening.”

“No, it shouldn’t.”

A sudden suspicion. “Didn’t you want to use HADES’ processing power, or, something?” She was uncertain about the words, thought she might have once read them in the notes she found in his camp. 

“This is just corruption," Sylens said. "The offensive nanobots are moving without direction, muddling the signal a bit, but disconnected from the original source.” 

“There’s another signal going off in the city,” Aloy said.

Sylens looked up. “I saw it.”

“Do you think this is going to revive the machines up here?”

“No. As I said, it’s without direction. It’s just the same as if you spilled water on a flat surface,” Sylens said.  

“Then let’s get back to the city,” Aloy said. 

As soon as she said it, he picked up the spear. 

Aloy touched her Focus again, looking around Sylens’ highlighted form toward the beeping circle on the plateau. “We’ll find that signal — and maybe get Yariki on the way.” 

 


	5. Chapter 5

“I thought we ruined all of the Focuses in the Eclipse network.” Rocks tumbled under Aloy’s feet as she ran down the path from the Spire. She knew she should go slower, but between the Focus signal and the corruption on the top of the tower, the entire city felt fragile. People had just rebuilt those elevators. To see them burn again … She would not allow it.

“We did.” Sylens was close enough behind her that her Focus didn’t default to his signal. Instead, Aloy strained to keep her eyes on the path and separate his voice from the clattering of the rocks and dirt at the same time. “This Focus could have been out of range, or damaged. Or just subject to random machine luck.”

“Or it isn’t a Focus.” Aloy threw herself across a ravine, hit the ground steady with both feet and kept running toward the stairs.

“What kind of machine could do that, other than a Tallneck?” Sylens followed her down the stairs, his breathing shallow.

Aloy almost laughed at the idea of a Tallneck tottering between the bridges and the Sun altar of Meridian. What terribly dangerous absurdity … “We have to get up that elevator fast.”

“Yes. When we get there, follow the signal. I’ll stay at the edge of the city and try to figure out who exactly it’s talking to.”

“Got it.”

There were two ways to get back to the plateau from the Spire tower. Both seemed equally lengthy to Aloy, likely to cost them too much time. One way curved north past Meridian’s mill, the other south to the gates of Meridian Village. Aloy checked her Focus again.

“She’s headed toward the village,” Aloy said. She defaulted to feminine pronouns when unsure of a person’s identity, as Rost had usually done. Sylens did not comment on the Nora phrasing. “I can move fast over there. You go to the elevator on the bridge and cut her off if she turns around.”

“I’ll be your eyes with the Focus; don’t let it slow you down.”

Aloy spun to face him, kicking up dirt on the track just below the Spire. The feeling of impending doom was gone: instead of pressure she now felt the concentration and momentum of the beginning of a good hunt. “Don’t kill them.”

He shrugged.

 _Yes, I have to tell you these things!_ Remember the Banuk on the way out of Ban-Ur, or whatever dark and snowy pass that particular betrayal had taken place in? And he had once said, “Only to you do I extend the courtesy of a warning." The northern gate would be secure enough. She turned her back to him and ran, enjoying the pace. The run would leave her clear-headed for whatever confrontation might come next.

The village fluttered with geese and maize and butterflies. This time, she didn’t pause to reflect at all on the blackened wood and broken buildings, but instead flew toward the elevator with the surety of a Glinthawk angling for scrap. The ride up was endless and jittery.

Just as she activated her Focus scan, Sylens spoke. “They should be right in front of you, moving south.”

Her own Focus said the same. “Up the stairs?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Where are you?”

“About to board the elevator,” Sylens replied.

“Okay.”

In the lengthening shadows it was hard to see the dark stairway in front of her, and Aloy had to cross back and forth once before she recognized it and ran up the stairs, each strike of her boots on the stone echoing throughout the stairwell.

At the top, a hand grasped at her sleeve. She pulled away before looking into the face of a young priest, pale and doughy, with a red scar cupping the right side of his face. “It was true! You saw it with your own eyes as the Buried Shadow rose up. Who are we, in these days of change, to doubt?”

It was not clear whether he was expecting a reply. “Sorry. Sorry.” Aloy gently tugged away and he did not follow.

“In the temple?” She muttered at her Focus.

“I believe so.”

Last time she had been here she had met Mournful Namman, one of the priests who seemed to want to change the hidebound Carja religion. It had been awkward, and then as now Aloy tried not to meet the eyes of the people grouped around the golden candles in the wide temple courtyard. It looked more like a party than a solemn ritual: Aloy could at least understand the appeal of the shade and the star-lit look of the candles. She crossed the busy temple, tying not to run into anyone as she jogged. She stopped to place a marker over the Focus signal, which she could now see was still to the south of her, but it was difficult to track the signal and move at a run at the same time. The Focus overlay itself had trouble keeping up, juddering into a new configuration every few breaths if she tried to move too quickly while using it.

“She’s still moving,” she muttered to Sylens as she headed for the balcony where the priests saluted the Sun at dawn.

“Yes. I think they’ve gone down the stairs,” he said.

A retort flashed through Aloy’s head — _you just told me to go up the stairs!_ — but the target was moving so fast that Aloy was sure neither she nor Sylens could easily predict her. Maybe it was someone familiar with the city, or familiar with moving through the jungle. She barreled down a flight of dark stone steps, found herself at nearly the same intersection where she had hesitated before.

“To the right,” Sylens said.

Aloy moved. The road ducked under a strong stone archway supporting the ramparts near the temple, then wound into the well-to-do area near the Hunter’s Lodge. Although the streets were narrower here than in the area near the market and the palace, they were clearly desirable; the overhanging balconies and hanging plants created a pleasant shade. The doors here were thick and richly colored, locked with metal pieces. If there was a street of equivalent affluence in Mother’s Heart, Aloy hadn’t known the village enough to identify it.

“You should see them soon," Sylens said.

Where? No one ran in the shadows, no one darted back toward the sunny markets. Aloy realized what had happened the instant before she saw the silver chip, like an arrowhead, catching the light on the ground. A Focus lay there, shining in the dirt.

“She dropped her Focus. Is this one of yours?" Aloy looked up and down the street as she picked up the device, wary of an attack from a person now rendered invisible to the one advantage she and Sylens held.

“Of all the tricks …” Sylens’ voice faded into a disgusted huff. Aloy suspected it was as much directed at himself as at their quarry. If this person was a member of the Eclipse, they might have figured out that they were being tracked through the device.

“We can use this.” Aloy closed her hand over the Focus.

“Yes.”

“She might still have broken north. I’ll keep watch here,” Aloy said.

“I’ll meet you. If we time this right we’ll be the spark of the trap,” Sylens said.

Aloy whirled around in the dim alley, intending to run back toward the northern span between the mesa and the plateau and hope that no merchants got underfoot. As she moved back toward the temple she noticed that there were more people out in the open in this area, merchants more likely to find buyers passing through or mercenaries more likely to find hire. Then she realized that the nearest woman, the person she had been intending to miss most closely in her mad dash, was familiar.

“Yariki!” Aloy called.

The envoy was wearing different clothing now. Instead of the furred hood she had worn at the entrance to the Cut she had a Carja-style sunshade made from the tail plates of a Watcher. It was the same woman, though, with kind eyes and a blue and yellow marking on her face. Last time Aloy had seen her, neither of them had any idea what she would face in the Cut. 

When Aloy had first met Yariki, she had noticed that the envoy’s voice was small and certain, each word chosen carefully. The same was true now. “Aloy! I’m glad to see you back. I heard there was even more violence than usual outside Song's Edge.”

“There was.” How to explain that she had become the leader of a werak, then handed that leadership back to Aratak? She wasn’t sure whether Yariki would consider the endeavor a victory or a shame. Maybe Aloy would have time to explain it properly later. “I’m looking for someone, maybe an Eclipse fighter. They would have ran this way. Did you see anything odd?”

“Not just now.” Yariki shook her head. 

Aloy growled. With so many other streets branching off here, it wasn’t surprising that Yariki hadn’t seen anyone.

“Although, I have an idea of where they might have gone,” Yariki said. “If someone wanted to get lost they’d probably leave the city, but if they wanted to stay in the city and _look_ like they wanted to get lost, they’d probably go to the festival.”

Aloy wrinkled her brow. “I think I remember Avad mentioning a festival.” He had said it in passing, before Aloy and Nasadi had gotten into strategy.

“He says it’s for the first fruits of the harvest, but I think it’s also to remind people that the city survived the attack. Dervahl, and what they call the Buried Shadow … everyone here seems just as on edge as the people in the Cut,” Yariki said.

“I know Avad _is_ working on calming things down, but … it isn’t easy.”

“Sounds like your work here is about as interesting as mine.” Yariki gave a small smile.

“Trust me, I want to hear all about it later,” Aloy said. “Listen, I have to go. If you see anything strange, please tell me or one of the guards; they can get it to Avad.”

“I will.” Yariki nodded.

Outside the elevated sun-ring with its bloody connotations, the next best place for a festival on the mesa was likely to be the market near the palace. Aloy walked in that direction more slowly, both because the crowd was thicker there and because she had lost the trail. While it might be possible for her to stop a person in this crowd, she wouldn’t know them without their Focus unless they wore an Eclipse uniform …

The crowd grew thicker as Aloy neared the festival. The Sun had not yet started to sink, and it hadn't been very long since she had come here on the way from the palace. People were still moving wares out of the way and rearranging the benches and tables usually used at the guards’ posts. Enterprising Carja had already started to sell food and drinks, though, and a band played music that echoed off the walls of the stone houses, beats rebounding and feeding into one another so that the band sounded much larger than the three people actually present. Aloy flicked her Focus on and found Sylens not far away, so she moved around the side of the market to see whether she could spot anyone suspicious heading along the bridge toward the palace. Erend or another guard had placed more men than usual at the entrance to the bridge. Angling her head, Aloy could see where the handholds Dervahl had used had been hacked off and dropped off the mesa, the wall behind them fitted with new stone with no space for hand-holds in the gaps. 

One of the guards muttered recognition. “Huntress.”

 _Close enough._ It was better than plenty of the pejoratives Carja tended to throw at the Nora.

Sylens’ signal was almost overlapping with Aloy’s, the Tallneck triangulation struggling to map their locations any more precisely, so Aloy circled back to the eastern entrance to the market. Sylens had thrown a blue-black jacket over his fur-lined shirt, to hide his arms. She presumed that the additional layer had come from his travel pack, something usually used in the rain or desert cold now put to use in the heat of the day.

She wondered for a moment whether she should greet him, but their silence on the Focus had been comfortable enough that it seemed unnecessary. Both of them were still on the hunt, even as the festival grew more crowded. Were this many people liable to fall off the mesa?

Many people around them wore scarlet Carja silk and heavy machine-skull helms. Two Banuk traders stood fanning themselves in the breeze from the newcomers. The musicians now formed the center of a crowd of Oseram dancers louder and more aggressively happy than the quiet couples drifting shyly in to dance further away.

“Easy enough to blend in,” Sylens said.

Aloy laughed. “Maybe for you. I never learned to dance like this,” she said wistfully. As a child she had not been allowed close enough to Mother’s Heart to see how they celebrated. She had danced with Rost sometimes, as children do, to the rhythm of both of their feet stomping or a stick against a rock.

Sylens folded his arms, then gestured out. “I did not necessarily mean that we should. Yariki was right to direct you here, though. Societies heal after the war ends. This one will require more of the blood to be scrubbed away first, but … they do make progress.”

Tempted to tell him not to be so cold, Aloy instead looked up at him and considered the rhythm. She still did not trust him. She still held over his head the fact of his betrayal. All of these people might have been dead if he or she had taken different actions, and it was partially the urgent realization of that which lead her to extend a hand to him. “There’s always a chance to learn,” she said softly.

He tipped his head at her in confusion or surprise for a moment, but when he caught on, the shift of his attention was total. He took her hand. His skin felt warm but dry in the humid heat. His expression was unreadable, but she lead them both to a place on the edge of the crowd of dancers.

Neither of them danced well, but the sound of the musicians drifted out and they could move roughly with the people around them. She tucked her arms around his neck, became uncomfortable on her toes and brushed her fingertips across the back of his head. When he settled his arms around her the rhythm became easier, linking them like the cords in the body of a machine. She saw a Carja couple beside them kiss, the woman’s arm pumping in the air in rapture or victory.

“None of this would have been possible without us.” Her gaze was drawn back to Sylens and would not move; it was as if the people around them were hidden in fog.

He eased closer, his breath against her mouth and the weight of his hands insistent. “Not without you.”

The cords between them pulled. She leaned up to kiss him, found him waiting. He opened his mouth against her, the heat of the Sun on cracked lips. It was so easy to take a breath and shift and press against him again, deepening the kiss until she sighed. She had wanted this, and wasn’t it so easy to take it? The rhythm of the dance filled them.

“I don’t trust you not to tear the world up again,” she said, without entirely knowing that she was going to do it. She was tripping over her words and heady with the kiss, but determined in her honesty; he had just bent to her again and so looked at her with eyes half-lidded and sharp.

“That’s because you’re wiser than this world,” he whispered, and she didn’t think that was true. The people around her would surely have been _less_ trusting than she was if they knew who stood beside them, but she recognized the words for the flattery they were, and for a bargain: trust would not come between them now. There was little need for it, when the stakes of the game were so low and common. She did not have to think about the world, now; she just had to press her hands to his skin and lean forward, and he would follow.

She kissed him again with an urgent anger, as if he would run. The cords on his chin rubbed against her face and cast a dim, sharp glow against his mouth.

Looking at this she hated and loved him in equal measure, unsure of how to express the sort of insistent care that could have as easily struck him.

A similar shadow passed across his expression, deepening the lines between his eyes and around his pierced mouth. She held him. They had stopped dancing and so he guided her to the side, where they could stand close near the wall and marvel at one another.

“Watch for people in a hurry,” Aloy murmured to Sylens, but she knew that both of them were distracted. She watched his breathing rise and fall in the shadowed corner (no Sun for the Eclipse’s tinker, no sky for the Nora to cast her eyes to the All-Mother — ), narrowed her eyes against the glow of the cords. They settled with his arm around her shoulders and her fingers lightly holding his, leaning comfortably against the wall. She watched with fascination what his skin looked like so close. Would she ever see this again?

Even now part of her was disgusted with him, with herself, with the twin Focuses on their ears. However, they had also — finally expressed this, finally worked out the way the machinery of the two of them worked even since she had first felt the cords weaving them together. Their conversations meandered so naturally now that the barrier between them had been set aside, however temporarily. She felt that she had won some sort of victory or argument for which the rest of the world was only a storm passing through.

That storm could destroy Meridian, though. Sylens was scanning the crowd, his absent look all the more maddening for the consistent tug of his fingers against hers. Their attentions were torn. Aloy took a deep breath, hoping that the dry air would remind her of her mission. She looked around the edges of the crowd, hoping to see someone moving furtively. But how would she tell a hidden killer from a resident uncomfortable with the revelry? She could understand the urge to skulk away, especially if anyone here felt the way Aloy had at the edge of Mother’s Heart, loathe to step into a baffling world of social graces and people that had never shown her any courtesy.

A familiar shade of blue caught her eye first, then Aloy recognized the build and the hair of the person skirting the edge of the festival. “There’s Yariki.”

“The first person I’ve seen around here who appears to be paying attention other than the guards,” Sylens murmured.

She tugged at his hand, silently admonishing: _you haven’t had your eyes on the crowd the entire time either._ But now she was thinking back on the conversation earlier, on exactly how much she had told Yariki about her own plans.

“She did seem to have a pretty clear idea of how not to get caught,” Aloy said. Her stomach soured, whether from the dance or from the idea of suspecting gentle Yariki of treachery she was not sure. “And I met her right outside where the Focus was dropped.”

“Let’s go.” He tugged on her hand in return before he dropped it. To Aloy, the small movement was a library’s worth of words: _we’ll talk about this later, too._

They followed Yariki into the high-walled alleys to the west.


	6. Chapter 6

Don’t linger in the cold. Hunters taught Sylens that, back when he was deep in the mnemonic songs and mechanical prayers of his studies, back when he tended to forget the outside world until he stepped into it.  Keep moving on the ice, they would say, because stopping is a message to the body. No chants, no stories, no memorization can save you from that message. To stop is to sing a song to all your bones, and that song says: S _top. Sleep. Freeze. You cannot go on._

He was frozen in this way by Aloy’s regard. The sensation of the pads of her fingers on his palm would not stop itching and prickling. He knew, as if he could read her thoughts, that she had felt the new/old nature of their relationship; very little had changed, except that he had kissed her and that he would like to kiss her again. 

Now was not the time, though, not when he followed her through the alleys pulling his cowl down over his forehead while she soft-footed in Yariki’s wake. The _fondness-distraction-need_ was just like the cold, now, tempting him to slow down. 

* * *

Aloy had felt it too, but she hurried forward. The day was still so hot that it stuck her clothing to her skin, but under the shadows between buildings it was slightly cooler. She cupped her hand over the light from her Focus as Yariki moved further ahead, and warily allowed more distance to come between them.

Ahead of her, Yariki turned a corner, immediately climbing a narrow flight of brick steps. Aloy eased back around the corner. Many people were still within sight further up the street, the chatter of the festival bouncing off the high stone walls, but the festival seemed to have either pulled most Meridian citizens like a whirlpool or repulsed them, leaving the streets around it clear. The Sun was gradually going down, and the air filled with the smells of tilled and torn ground from lower down. Sylens appreciated the rich smells and cooler air. 

“Just like climbing to the Alpha bunker,” Aloy whispered. The door creaked nearby, and yellow light pooled softly in the street. Yariki was not skulking around; she talked quietly to at least one other person in the doorway before going inside and shutting the door. 

“Fewer machines, more inclement weather.” Sylens shrugged his overcoat off. “Take this. Your hair is more recognizable than I am.” 

Aloy looked at him as if suspecting an ulterior motive. Why would he leave himself exposed for her, after all that time in hiding? He saw her realize that one reason was obvious, and she brushed her hands against his when she took the jacket. It was too long for her, but when she pushed the sleeves up they stayed, and the hood fell loose enough to cover her braids. 

“That Focus I found.” She patted the pouch into which she had put it. “I asked whether it was one of yours.”

“Let me see.”

She picked it out quickly, pressed it into his palm. He ran his first finger along the side, looking for the join. He had needed to pry many of the Focuses apart and put them back together, and the join had often ended up more ragged than when he had begun. Sealing them with sap was too fragile and could impede the electronics, while welding with such precision was impossible. Instead he had scored tiny teeth into the gaps between particularly recalcitrant casings, and this Focus … yes, his nail caught on the teeth. 

“Yes.” _It’s an Eclipse Focus_ , he could have said. He could have removed his own complicity, but that would be inaccurate and easily seen through. Besides, he respected Aloy too much to tell her convenient lies like ‘ _the Buried Shadow has blessed us with its voices’._

Aloy’s eyebrows drew together. She quickly wiped the disapproving expression away, then reached out to touch his arm. “You’re just as likely to be spotted as I am. If you are, _tell the truth._ ”

“We are helping the blameless one keep his city in order.” Sylens shrugged. “We need no other authority.” 

Aloy nodded. Her touch drifted away, and he looked over her head at where the yellow light had been before, trying to focus on the heat of the sky and the texture of the stone walls instead of on the bond between them. The cords had turned into vine, fragile and living. 

Aloy turned away, leaving the Eclipse Focus in his hand. 

* * *

Beside the red stone stairs, a loop of rope hung from a light. From there, it was easy enough for Aloy to pull herself hand-over-hand to the top of the wall, where a window gave her a glimpse into the house Yariki had entered. She pulled the hood down low over her face, wishing she didn’t feel so conspicuous and clammy wearing Sylens’ rain gear in the heat. The guards knew her, though; suspicion could be forgiven if it came to that, as long as she didn’t end up finding out that Marad himself was plotting something against the city. She wouldn’t have suspected Yariki if the Banuk woman’s words hadn’t seemed so certain: she had outright said that a spy might try to lose pursuers in the festival.

Aloy nudged a curtain outside. The windows in Meridian were closed with thin slats of wood, intended to create shade and a draft instead of to keep warmth in like the thick walls in Mother’s Heart. She looked in onto a stairway like the one in Olin’s house, with enough open space between the bannister and the second-floor room that she could see down into the level where Yariki had entered. Crouched where she was near the windowsill of the third floor, Aloy could see three people seated on low, heavy stools. Red robes covered their laps, but at her angle, Aloy couldn’t quite see their faces. 

“Greetings,” Yariki said. It was hard to hear her voice, but the word was simple enough to infer, especially when the other people in the room stood and bowed to her as they returned the formality. 

“Did you have the chance to enjoy the festival?” The voice was male and familiar. The robes marked them as Sun-Priests, Aloy realized, so the second person was most likely also a man. 

“A little bit. I’m still getting used to the city.” Yariki sounded uncertain, so it became more difficult to hear her. She sat down comfortably, though, and they kept talking casually about how long Yariki had been in the city and how she planned to work with Marad to improve relations with the Banuk. Judging by the horrors the Cut equivalent of the Red Raids had wrought, there would be many scars to heal, but Aloy was impatient. She had come for information about the strangely aggressive machines or the Eclipse network, not for political tensions she had already seen firsthand. Yariki seemed exactly as calm as she had been at the edge of the Cut — namely, not very, but in a way that seemed intrinsic to her personality instead of a sign of subterfuge. 

“People will come to the Sundom looking for help, where they might once have gone to the Eclipse looking for revenge,” one of the priests said. “We must be sure the two do not lead to the same violent ends.”

As Aloy’s mind wandered, she realized who the familiar voice belonged to: Mournful Namman, the priest who had helped three people from other regions memorialize their loved ones in Carja lands. He had wanted to change the Sun Priests from the violent sect they had been before to something more … spiritual, Aloy supposed. What exactly their new role was expected to be was a mystery to her, but Namman had seemed to want to respect the traditions of others as well as to expose the Carja’s bloody recent history. From the window she could only see his hands occasionally shifting on the arms of the chair. 

“And what about Vanasha’s work?” 

Aloy perked up as the second man said Vanasha’s name, but Yariki’s response was difficult to hear. Namman had stood up and returned with a pot of tea and cups, which he distributed. For a moment the smell of wood smoke wafted up to Aloy, full of the flowery scent of the herbs that grew by the riverside where the waterfalls plunged down the edges of the plateaus. 

“Vanasha…” Yariki said. The next few words were too quiet to hear, like paint smudged over words. Aloy thought she heard “Banuk,” then wondered whether she had predisposed herself to mistake another word for it because she had been listening for it. After the priests stopped pouring tea and began to drink quietly, Aloy could hear Yariki more clearly. “…Aloy helping. I’ve heard that if anyone can catch them, she can.”

“We’ve also heard rumors of Eclipse, but there has been … some debate on whether spreading the word would cause fear or help keep citizens safe,” the second priest said.

“Find the truth in the light of the Sun,” Namman quoted. “But I think Blameless Marad’s light is more subtle than ours.” 

“Yes. If half of what I’ve heard about him is true, he keeps a neat house. We’ll leave that to the others.” Aloy could hear the smile in Yariki’s voice. It didn’t seem likely that these three would speak so casually — so trustingly — of Marad’s spy network if they opposed it. They also spoke as if Vanasha was the more public face of the two of them, which made sense — Marad had never _told_ Aloy he was Avad’s spymaster when they first met, but there had been no doubt about it after just one conversation about the security of the city. 

Marad would probably have been a match for Ted Faro himself. Aloy had to try not to laugh at the thought of Marad managing Blevins, redirecting the ancient man’s obsession with weapons.

Someone walked onto the street below her. The Sun was low enough that Aloy thought Sylens’ dark blue coat might help her blend into the dark red wall, but if the person walked directly underneath her, she would be highlighted by the lantern she had used to climb the wall. She risked standing straight up, found a handhold on one of the bricks of the third floor, and clambered onto the tile roof. 

The visitors were angling for the stairway.

When she opened the Focus scan, she saw the five heat signatures on the street, and a cloud of people one block away at the festival, each indistinguishable from one another. Sylens’ own Focus was transmitting, though, and she could see him nearby. 

“Sylens?” She whispered. He did not reply.

The fear that filled her was unusually deep, an ache at her sternum. She held the sleeves of his jacket together, pressing down on the fabric. Was romance supposed to feel like this, so fearful and sickening? If this was the emotion that Elida had ventured to her island for, she had been strong to hide such a severe wound. What if he left Aloy behind? He could have taken the opportunity to run, but he had not. The number of ways in which he could possibly leave her had increased.

That idea produced a different, more familiar kind of anger. She followed the Focus signal back toward the festival.

* * *

 It was easy, almost natural, for Sylens to keep to the sidelines. Different cultures had different tendencies and he found that, in general, the Carja were not especially likely to engage in conversation with strangers unprompted; this made it easier for him to walk around the outskirts of the festival, looking for anyone he recognized or who seemed to be beelining out of the city with the same certainty Yariki had shown. Aloy had just left, and he tried carefully to compartmentalize her away from the investigation he needed to continue now. 

Aloy was doing most of the work on that investigation now. However, Sylens had been considering Yariki on the way into the city and did not think she could have thrown the machines into such disarray as he had seen. He didn’t know her from Banukai, couldn’t have said whether or not she had the skill for it, but what would she gain? She was already an emissary with access to the king, and unlikely to already be frustrated enough by the royal bureaucracy to choose a violent course. Maybe the Carja bloodshed and continuing snobbery fueled her ire, but reacting by threatening farmers with machines was too indirect. The person causing such chaos — and it was mostly chaos they had caused, whispers and creeping fear instead of Dervahl’s smoke and fire — was not _skilled_ in subterfuge. 

Maybe Marad knew that. Perhaps he had hired counter-spies just to spy on them in turn. 

So while Aloy listened at Yariki’s door, Sylens looked for Vanasha. 

He expected to find her at the outskirts of the festival, and so retraced his steps. As the sky darkened over the plateau the guardsmen had set out torches that created comfortable nests of light and orange heat at intervals along the sides of the square. The smell of vegetables cooked in coals and stew thick with meat and bones wafted back and forth between the smell of the flame. Vanasha could changed he attitude like her clothes, but still he did not expect to find her in the thick of the crowd. She still had business to attend.

His idea proved right; he found her talking to a man with light skin and a harried mien. A metal circlet clung to sparse gray hair and lined skin. While Vanasha stood cool and regal, this man seemed likely to flit away. 

“Several amendments of this proposal were edited by the land keepers who wanted to make suggestions,” the man was saying. 

“Have the guardsmen been enforcing any of these yet?” Vanasha leaned back, but her intent look gave her the impression of devoted attention. 

“The ones that have passed. Oh, there’s such ambition among the guards. Many want to be Kestrels. They want to serve in front of the palace. They’re eager to follow. Some of the farmers think there aren’t enough of them, in fact, or not enough strongly trained — there are rumors of Tenakth beyond the lake. To speak frankly, I think some people see raiders behind every stone simply because we aren’t the ones raiding any more. I’ve been doing this work long enough, and through such strange times, that I know; it’s often the landholders who see shadows in the dark no matter the time of day.”

Vanasha’s smile was calculated, but so bright that Sylens could not help but be drawn in, close enough that the Carja man met his eyes curiously. “They have more time to do that than refugees do. Avad has tried to make the transition smooth,” she said.

“We’ve had stranger envoys than that, too. A man came out of the West last week claiming to know who speaks for Sunfall," the other man said.

“We know who speaks for Sunfall,” Vanasha answered quickly. She meant Avad, Sylens presumed. What an opportunity to assert the new king’s territory! He would have, by default, kept legal ownership of Sunfall after the Eclipse scattered …

“Didn’t sound like he meant that,” Lahavis said.

Sylens turned to Vanasha just as she looked at him. The recognition was unmistakable, then jarring. She seemed to read more on his face than he could read on hers. 

Lahavis continued. “You know, there’s been remarkably little said out front against Avad. They speak out about it on porches, but when it comes to writing the edicts his say has just as much sway as the thirteenth king’s.”

Sylens took note of the number. Did they not want to, or not know exactly how to, speak of Jiran? 

The Carja man continued. “Avad is a dagger in a jeweled box. That’s the impression a lot in Brightmarket have, I believe. They can’t see the bloodstains on the outside, so they assume there must be some hidden away.” 

“Instead of the bloody dagger right in front of them.”

“Exactly so.” He nodded, seemed satisfied that he had painted a picture of his village.

“Please, Lahavis, enjoy the festivities,” Vanasha said. “I have a private matter to attend.” Again that flash of teeth, as if letting Lahavis in on a secret. 

Sylens had wrapped words that secret up like gifts to give to Aloy. He was practiced, though, in voicing nothing of the intimation of closeness. 

Lahavis moved, still with that fretting birdlike gait, out into the center of the square where people were crowded and talking. Vanasha watched his back as he left, then gestured for Sylens to walk with her.

Past two torches she was silent. He thought she would take him back to the nearly-deserted market street, but instead she waited beside a closed-in porch as if expecting to go inside. 

“He is a writer of edicts,” she explained. “Something of a go-between with Brightmarket and the king, now.” 

“Who does he think you are?”

“A scribe in Avad’s court,” Vanasha answered quickly. “It’s easy to make people think the court’s inner circle is larger than it is. Avad does most of his own scribing.” She smiled, not so wide as before. “But I listen, tinker. That I do. You must have been paying close attention yourself to know I was putting him on.” 

“Yes.” In fact, Sylens had not noticed a difference; he had never been good with faces. The diplomat’s voice had given him away. Voice was easier, and Lahavis had been babbling. Whether it was in fear of Vanasha or for his town, Sylens could not guess. “He was nervous.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t recognize me from when we washed ashore on Brightmarket with the queen. Maybe he did.”

“You can learn through Brightmarket’s mouthpiece how the towns are feeling.” 

“Exactly. But … Her voice trailed off, her gaze drifting east. “Ah. There’s the very man who needs that knowledge.” 

To Sylens’ surprise, Marad stood near a cart filled with carefully labeled tubs of spices and butter. He wore the same burgundy robes as before, and looked sour-faced. Maybe people were afraid of Avad. Maybe people were afraid of Marad, who instead of shifting his own shape sent people like Vanasha so effectively in his stead … 

She moved toward Marad. Sylens took one step to follow, but Vanasha turned around and looked up at him unexpectedly, close enough that her cowl almost brushed against his face. 

“Please. Aloy seems to like you, but do run along and wait for us to call another meeting,” she said.

“Aloy and I have an understanding. Don’t assume that means we like one another,” Sylens said.  

She narrowed her eyes. He had revealed something there, hadn’t he? Quietly letting her assume he felt affection for Aloy would have been so much simpler. Precision, though. Precision had driven him all the way from Ban-Ur. He sighed. 

“You do,” Vanasha said.

Sylens hadn’t been expecting that. 

Vanasha, evidently, had. “You’ve made some sort of deal to pretend not to. That’s good; I think she needs that. Take it slow.”

She left him, melted into the shadows beside Marad. He was left feeling threatened, although he could not place exactly why. _I think she needs that._ Vanasha was wrong, of course — how silly, for a spy of all people to wear trust like finery. 

_I think she needs that._

He had not thought he was concerned with what Aloy needed. What she wanted, maybe, whether or not she was seeking the subordinate functions for reasons that made sense. The idea of need struck him like a fall onto ice, like a waterfall frozen over into a barricade of spears. Why? 

He took Marad’s place behind the cart, idly scanned the area with his Focus. The festival was a mass of people, fused into a solid lump by the silhouettes on the play of shadow and light. He heard Aloy say his name from beside Yariki’s apartment, though, and it was with that cold need that he went back.


	7. Chapter 7

Aloy shed Sylens’ jacket as soon as she saw him, idly handing it over while she looked toward the east. Her Focus glowed. The coat sat heavily in his arms as he watched her track something in the holographic display. 

 “What is it?” he muttered.

 “Glinthawks.” Her eyes narrowed. “They’re swarming the Spire. How could the HADES node be able to control them?”

 “It could be a defense mechanism, shared by HADES and GAIA. They both wanted to be able to end the world, at one time. She had to make sure machines would not destroy the towers.”

 “Maybe. But I don’t like the idea that HADES can talk to the machines.”

 “Nor do I.” 

 “Either way, we need to get to the tower. Our culprit is back to finish her work!” Aloy took a deep breath, then started to walk. Her hunched shoulders told Sylens all he needed to know about how nervous she felt, not about the prospect of a fight, but about moving back through the festival square and possibly seeing the people on whom she had been spying a moment before. 

 “It isn’t Yariki,” she continued. “She’s meeting with the Sun Priests about fixing some of the Carja’s political problems. Good luck changing all of _their_ minds; I bet Mournful Namman wishes he could fight some of his brothers in the Sun-Ring. But Yariki is on our side. I _knew_ it wasn’t her.” 

 Her nervousness was contagious, but Sylens was more reluctant than she was to jump into a fight against machines. She _would_ expect him to fight. The weight of the lance on his back was distracting as he ran through the city after her. Maybe he could find a place to wait it out. He would do more good as a battlefield coordinator than a hunter. She should have seen already that he was most valuable as a guide.

As he and Aloy approached the elevator he could see the glinthawks clearly. From a distance the machines looked harmless, but they swooped low over the tower on which the Spire stood, harassing Carja Kestrels. 

The climb up the tower in the dark was touched by his awareness of the festival behind them, the fire and the memory of the kisses growing distant. Brands burning at the gates were as beautiful as a sunset, the blue-black sky soft and clarified. There had been nights like this before he had met Aloy, too. Nights of breakthroughs, when he dug through ancient records and found a new way to express the science he had learned in bits and pieces. He had sometimes sat at the ragged edge of GAIA Prime’s gateway and watched the darkening mountains for hours, stunned by the triumph of the day’s work. 

The clarity helped him put some pieces together. What had Marad been doing at the festival? 

 “Vanasha hasn’t found an answer yet,” he said as he ran beside Aloy. “She and Marad are still collecting rumors from villagers. She spoke to a man named Lahavis, a diplomat.” 

 “Oh, the diplomat from Brightmarket. You don’t remember?”

 “Brightmarket was at peace. It was of little consequence to our work.” 

 She laughed. “I guess you didn’t quite experience it like I did. I wouldn’t remember his name so well if his daughter hadn’t needed help.” But she didn’t explain further. 

 Toward the top of the tower the torn ground was steep enough to hide most of the view of the sky, so it was with a bowed head braced for claws that Sylens emerged onto the lawn. 

 Aloy ran ahead, boots thumping on the dirt. The Kestrels had engaged the glinthawks, arrows too small to see and too inexpert to hit vital points flying into the air. 

 “Check the Spire,” Aloy said over her shoulder. “We can’t let this happen again.” 

 “It won’t,” Sylens said. “HADES is too fragmented.” 

  _It._ The end of the world, the ground bursting and rusting beneath their feet. The feeling of it lodged in him and poisoned. Had it felt this way before? 

 Aloy kept running. He heard the slice of a flame being lit, the click of a nocked arrow. “Be careful.” Her voice whispered through the Focus. 

 “The world can’t go without us,” he said.

 Aloy got the glinthawks' attention. More arrows arced into the air as the machines turned toward her. It was easy, familiar work for Sylens to crouch down and move between the hills, hearing the battle in the distance. No matter how the Kestrels shouted; it was so unlikely that Aloy would be wounded here that he did not worry. She had never faltered against glinthawks before.

 He hesitated before crossing the last swath of lawn toward the Spire. As he leaned around the tan bricks of a half-collapsed wall he saw a person crouched near the HADES node, corruption puddling in two crescents around him. Stringy blond hair flicked at pale shoulders as the man examined the node. Sylens couldn’t tell whether he was speaking to it or trying to take it apart or put a piece in. If this whelp got something working … Aloy knew that Sylens had been working to restore HADES to a communicative state, but she had not known the frustration of looking at the tiny curl of corruption in the cage, willing it to speak. Willing it to help him bring APOLLO back, to unlock the bars that held a library greater than Avad could ever imagine.

 Sylens unhooked his lance. The integration of the blue light power source with his weapon was not as elegant as the one he had given to Aloy, although he had reverse-engineered some of the properties of her override in order to enable himself to tame machines. It wouldn’t interface with HADES, but he didn’t need it to. He needed to knock one man to the ground while the battle, screeching and thundering, covered the sound of his tracks.

 The HADES node did not have a voice any more. What voice it had was hibernating back in the wreckage of the Titan. Sylens still tensed in case he heard that booming sound again.

 The man in Eclipse colors yelped when Sylens slapped the spear up under his arm, keeping the deadly point well ahead of him but gaining enough leverage to spin him around. Sylens grasped the lance over the man’s shoulder and levered him to the ground. Corrupt oil hissed and splashed onto the man’s bare shoulder, black and inert where it had flowed among the grass.

Sylens tugged the spear away before the man’s shoulder broke. A foot on his chest and the spear-point at his throat forestalled any other movements.

Sylens shuffled, keeping his own boot out of the spill. “That’s off limits,” he said. “You’re fortunate the guards were busy with the glinthawks.” 

 “Get off of me.” The Shadow Carja paused while he thought about his next words. Red skin had burnt badly in the desert. He was fresh out of childhood, impressionable and plain-faced. “Why do you care? You aren’t Carja!”

 All of this silly loyalty to newborn city-states was tiring. Sylens ground his heel in. “I am easily bored.”

 He saw the man think about spitting, then consider that he was on his back and swallow. “King Avad sends couriers to say how glorious his new regime is while there are still soldiers starving in Sunfall.”

 “What were you doing up here?”

 “We served. We held the Sun in our hands, and that murderer Avad denies us our voices”

 “Mm-hmm.” Sylens lifted his foot. With the spear point still in place, the Shadow man didn’t flinch until Sylens kicked his elbow, angling the back of his hand into the puddle of corruption. 

 With a scream, he tried to knock Sylens off balance by grabbing his near foot. It might have worked if not for the spear, Sylens leaned down and drove the point into the soft ground next to the man’s left ear while he resettled his foot on his chest. The Shadow Carja man clutched the burnt hand close, but it kept burning and threatened to drop lines of black and red acid onto his face, so he settled for shaking it away from his body, tensing away from the puddle. 

 “What were you doing?” Sylens repeated.

 “Wait…” The man’s face twisted. He was still wincing from the pain in his hand, but there was a sharper look in his watery brown eyes now. “I know you.”

 Sylens’ stomach dropped. _It can’t possibly be the_ torture _that seemed familiar_.

 And _of course_ the sounds of battle had stopped, and _of course_ there were footsteps coming toward him, and of course beside Aloy walked Vanasha. 

 “You were Helis’ secret,” the Shadow Carja whimpered. “The tinker he would call out when he needed machinery taken apart.” His voice rose. “You know what these thieves have taken from us. Why are you stopping me?” 

 The hunting party drew close. Sylens sighed at Aloy. “You told me not to kill him.”

 Her cheeks flushed, her expression set in wry disapproval. Whether she disapproved of Sylens’ method or the entire situation he wasn’t sure. Vanasha’s expression was so stony that Sylens knew she had heard. 

 “Give him to Vanasha,” Aloy said. 

 Sylens stepped away. The Shadow Carja turned to try to grab the spear, but Vanasha cuffed him across the head, then locked his arms behind his back in a hard-march tangle. Not one of the more impressive members of Helis’ army — perhaps he hadn’t been involved in any of the camps Aloy visited because he had been too skinny to fight. He could have been telling the truth about starving at Sunfall. More Kestrels jogged up to the Spire, looking for arrows on the ground as they moved.

 “Would you like to explain yourself in a way _other_ than attacking a member of the city guard?” Vanasha asked.

 The Shadow Carja man laughed. He spat now, a gob that sizzled in the nanobot ooze. “Last time I see you was in an Eclipse camp, and now this? When you fall forever from the sight of the Sun, tell Helis’ shade that Azati says hello. You know, the rumor was that you recruited him instead of the other way around. Was certainly you that brought the Metal Devil to us, taught it to speak!”

 Sylens had kept his expression controlled in front of Marad, in front of Aloy, in front of his own would-be executioners. It was easy to do the same now. 

 She kept her face equally stony as she offered Azati a lenient sentence in exchange for information. Once presented with the opportunity to accuse someone else, he had no further interest in incriminating himself.  Faced with silence, Vanasha shook her head and turned to her soldiers. 

 “Take him back to the city,” she ordered the Kestrels. 

 “If I don’t examine this node it is likely the machines will go wild again,” Sylens said. 

 Vanasha held his gaze for a long time before nodding. The Kestrels surrounded the Shadow soldier. Aloy moved closer to the HADES unit and stood with her arms crossed, hunched and disapproving as she scanned the unit and the corruption with her Focus. The whole company of guards wheeled back toward the city, pennants waving from their spears. 

 Sylens had seen the same thing she had: the unit was inert. He sank to one knee in the dry patch in front of it and felt for seams around the lens, but the intelligence that had seen out of this eye was still dormant. He scanned what records the Focus could pull, saw the tiny diamond icon that indicated Aloy had shared his screen with hers. She would not be able to read the code, but gaining reference points wouldn’t hurt. 

 He found a familiar pattern. For a moment he was surprised that it was so familiar, but what had he thought this boy could possibly do that he had not already done? “There it is.”

 Vanasha prodded him with the heel of her hand. “Great. Let’s go.” 

 Aloy’s icon disappeared. “This should take care of the machines. I need to talk to Marad.” She glanced at Sylens.

 Good. She was taking the initiative, demanding that she talk to Marad about Sylens’ fate instead of letting Vanasha take him in chains. He didn’t expect that he would be held long, but it was reassuring. It surrounded him like the brightness of the city lights in the night. He raised his head for Aloy’s knife at his neck. (Would he have done this yesterday?) 

 The march back to the palace was quiet. 

 Vanasha, Aloy, and the guards escorted Azati to a prison cell, then brought Sylens to the library. Sylens was more focused on his own fate than Azati’s. Sylens had not been formally accused of anything, and neither woman had yet spoken of what they had heard at the Spire. He imagined that Vanasha and Marad had an information network so thorough it might as well have been a Focus, and indeed he never did catch the moment when Marad had actually been told. 

 It would have to be discussed eventually, but Sylens would make his own case first. 

 They stood at the table where Nasadi had made her plans, the figurines of soldiers and machines rearranged and tipped over from where they had stood last time he had been here. At night the stone of the library kept it so cool as to be almost chilly. Marad placed both hands on the table. 

 “The guard reassures me that we no longer have to worry about the remnants of Jiran’s army agitating our city,” Marad said.

 "That seemed to be the last one,” Vanasha replied. “And a sorry example.” 

 “Did he confess?”

 “The information we need is all in our Focuses,” Aloy said. “I can teach you to read it. But I’m not sure how it will hold up in a Carja tribunal …” 

 "Yes. We will have to work on that. I will admit I’m tempted to find him guilty on your word, but Avad is trying to make these things more transparent.” Marad’s words were so dry Sylens was unsure of whether he agreed with the monarch or not. "Did you find out what he wanted at the Spire, Aloy?” 

 “Sylens did.” Aloy looked at him. She again stood with her arms folded, her expression unreadable. Every once in a while a flash of fear or guilt would emerge and color her cheeks. She would not hold his secret for long, Sylens thought, but she might have figured out a way to make his sentence short. He would escape, of course, but the effort meant something.

 “The man had some basic understanding of the … what did Aloy explain to you about the network?” Sylens asked.

 “Presume that she has shared the hierarchy of machine intelligences with us,” Marad said.

 Sylens cocked his head. “Fair enough. The Eclipse man tried several times to connect this HADES node with other nodes. He attempted to do so by piggybacking on GAIA’s signals. It uses the same frequency transmitted by the Tallnecks, which explains  the odd behavior of the machines around it. The problem was that it was a transmission frequency, nothing more. He could not download any data. It would never manage to link up to any other nodes.”

 “Are you sure?” Aloy prompted.

 “I am sure, because I tried it.”

 Aloy sighed. “What he’s trying to say is, the city is safe. Anyone who tries this again will just run into the same problem, and considering that this one was working alone, no one will.”

 “That is not exactly what I was trying to say,” Sylens said. 

 Aloy turned to him. "People need to feel safe right now, not like the attacker was too stupid to be effective.”

 “He was inexpert … ” Sylens glanced at Marad. “You’re right, Aloy. Not important right now.” 

 Marad narrowed his eyes. “Are you certain this person was working alone?” He addressed Aloy, leaning across the table toward her.  

 "We closed down the Eclipse Focus network long before this,” Aloy said. “This man was probably able to tell that the Spire was an unnatural feature because of their Focus, but nothing indicates that they really knew what they were working with … other than the ‘Buried Shadow. And it seems like your priests are working on stamping out that particular belief.”

 “Yes. The fact remains that you know, and that our intruder seemed to recognize your friend.” 

 There it was, the accusation quick as one of Aloy’s arrow shots. 

 She was equally fast in response. “He was right. I trust him, but only when he’s in my sight.” She pressed her lips tightly together, worried but determined. 

 “Was Azati right about everything?” Vanasha said. “That you started the Eclipse, that you raised the Metal Devil?”

 “Aloy had no part in it,” Sylens said.

 “Of course she didn’t. Did you?” Marad said.

 Sylens shut his eyes. He cursed to himself. Was there a way out of this? He should have looked into Marad’s history. He should have stabbed that boy through the throat at the transmission tower. Except that if he was going to work with Aloy, perhaps there was some measure of truth required here, even though it pained to speak. 

 “I know crimes that make Jiran’s bloodbaths look clean,” Sylens said. 

 Aloy startled a little. Perhaps she wasn’t expecting the ghost of Ted Faro instead of Helis to be invoked here.

 “My participation was in service of a lost history you would hardly understand. Building one small tent from the vast equipage of your king’s predecessor’s army is nothing.” 

 “That’s a confession,” Vanasha snapped. 

 “Would you rather we told you and never caught Azati?” Aloy asked Marad.

 The air was so cold and tense it could have cracked like ice. 

 Marad steepled his fingers. “I can respect how circumspect your alliance is, but I prefer it not to take place in my city. The guards will have your description … tinker, was it? From the long patrols to the palace. Do not cross that line. You know this is a light sentence.”

 You _do not know how light._

  _Sylens_ met Aloy’s eyes as Vanasha gestured guards forward. She tipped her head toward her Focus. Maybe she and Vanasha would speak later. Maybe she and Marad would have more mysteries to solve. It didn’t entirely matter to Sylens. Aloy would share with him the records relevant to their work. The Kestrels were going to escort him to the bridge and allow him to walk away, and … hadn’t that been easy!

 The onyx claw glittered on the scroll shelf as he left the library.  

 

* * *

 

 Aloy made plenty of noise climbing up the cliff, so by the time she arrived Sylens was sitting at the highest point of the ledge near the prison himself. The Moon was almost full, hanging low over the lakes. 

 When she levered herself up the last shoulder of rock, she didn’t even have to catch her breath before she spoke. “Did you ever come to these places before?”

 “Sometimes,” Sylens said. The Focus tags were a curiosity. “But these recordings look back. The vistas are no good by themselves. We need to use them to move forward.” 

 “By getting ourselves kicked out of Meridian?”

 That was quick. “Not us. Just me.”

 “Marad suspected, you know.” 

 Sylens raised one eyebrow. 

 Aloy sat down on the rock beside him. “He still doesn’t know everything. But the guards have been informed. You shouldn’t come to the city again,” she said.

 “Not even with the favor of their hero?”

 She leaned over and bumped her shoulder against his. “I show no such favor,” she said. “We’re even, now.”  

 The warmth of her and the warmth of the sun mingled together to soothe him. After twenty-five years out of Ban-Ur, he had never stopped appreciating warmth. He closed his eyes and leaned back, bracing with his arms and feeling the bruise. “What happened to the Shadow Carja?”

 “He’s still in prison. They’ll likely put him to work repairing the village after the attack.” 

 “I could have suffered the same fate. You have manage to instill in the palace some perspective.” 

 “Oh, don’t try to flatter me by suggesting that their view on the ancient ones has anything to do with this. Marad knew you weren’t trustworthy from the start.” She paused. “But I talked to Vanasha about why you did it, about how forming the Eclipse was just a bloody side project. She isn’t understanding, and neither am I.”

 “We have already had most of this conversation.” He glanced at her, then returned to looking at the sapling blocking part of the vista. It was more difficult to meet her eyes now than it had been after the Sun-Ring. 

 “Not with the city, we haven’t. Not with the people on all of these lands.”

 “I admit, I am reluctant to return to Meridian.”

 “Of course you are. Don’t get yourself killed. And I know it’s difficult to kill you. But Marad had us both playing right into his hands, us to track both Azati and Yariki. Don’t underestimate the spy network.”

 “Thorough advice.”

 “A little time spent tracking in the service of the king is the least you owe them.” 

 “What would I owe the Carja? You saved Meridian with my help. If anything, the ancients owe us all. The debt which we might have owed them for our survival wrestles with their guilt for Faro’s murders and our ignorance of our own history.”

 Aloy gave one quiet, bitter laugh. “Still not worried about the people alive now you might have hurt.” She stood up. The rock face behind the Vantage was steep and covered in growth, but she seemed to seriously consider climbing it anyway. Had the bond between them been growing all the while he was away from Meridian? He could feel it like a tiny green shoot, like the thinnest lines on the diagrams cast by the Focus. Vanasha had said that she needed comfort. Maybe he needed her too. 

 “You’re right,” he said. 

 She found a toehold and lifted herself up. Only then did she turn to look at him, skeptical and ready to flee.

 “I usually do discount the importance of the people involved. You saved Meridian by forming alliances, as you did in the Cut. That’s your strength. I see the world as a fossil, Aloy, the skeleton of an animal buried in dust until it changes into rock. You see that it is alive. That perspective is … required.” 

 Anther bitter laugh. “That’s as close to guilt as I’m going to get you. Follow me.” She disappeared into the thick jungle.

 Balancing carefully between handholds on the rock face, he was reminded of the first time he had felt close to her, in the jungles further south. She had emerged from the Eclipse camp soaking wet and seething, full of fire and wounded, carefully cultivated dignity. The jungle thinned out only slightly at the top of the cliff. Perhaps Aloy had brought him here to get out of the view of the prison, away from any superstition that in looking at the Vantage, eyes from the past could look back. 

 She turned to face him. The shield of the armor she had stitched together from an ancient set shimmered. “I’m going to keep looking for other parts of HEPHAESTUS. It caused far too much damage in the Cut.” 

 “Not planning to stay in Marad’s employ?”

 “No. I won’t be staying to become Marad’s spy, or Avad’s. It’s just the rest of the planet we have to keep our eyes on now.” 

 “If you go to Ban-Ur you go to another place where I cannot follow.”

 “Stop blaming me for places that exiled you,” Aloy laughed, but she stepped toward him. Brown eyes with flecks of gold, or were they gold with flecks of brown? 

 This close he spoke in a murmur. “You and I watch over the world, Aloy. It is great work.” 

 The trees cast dappled green shadows over her face. “When the world is safe, we can figure out what it owes us.” 

 “Us, now.” 

 She took his hand. The movement was a surprise, the sudden slip of warm fingers against his. “I won’t stay with you. Just for now.”

 “Of course not,” he said. “You would be unable to travel as you —”

 “Stop talking.” 

 The jungle was close and hot, birds keening. She cupped his cheek in her left hand and guided him to her, a kiss soft as their first but more precise and practiced. When they parted he opened his eyes just to see hers half-lidded, the gold furious. 

 He tugged her hand toward him and embraced her, was surprised when she laughed and leaned back. 

 “Slowly,” she said, laughing. White light cascaded across her face. “The shield reacts to kinetic force. I haven’t tested the speed yet, but anecdotally it —”

 “By the Sun, Aloy,” he said, and eased at an angle to feel the tiny pressure of the force shield on his skin.

 “Slowly.” 

 They parted later, as they had to. Sylens started hiking back through the jungle in the other direction, conscious of the soft sounds behind him as Aloy brushed through the undergrowth. Neither of them would pause in their work, their competition to see who would utilize the AI network to its fullest abilities first. He held in carefully regimented memory the cord of longing and fondness and secrets between them, their bitter bond gathered up like jewels in a necklace. He wished, as if he was not already feeling the humid sunlight, to hold within him the mild heat of Meridian. 

 


End file.
